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«Cut-ups are for everyone»: Margin Notes to «A Cut-up Fragment Rearranged»Cluster the First
… in the beginning was the cut-up word …
Back in 1976, Oeuvres Croisée was unknown in Italy. Almost no hints were available on the cut-up and fold-in techniques, but some quotations from The Exterminator and from «Censorship, notes on these pages», in the Preface to the Italian version of Naked Lunch …
«Cut the Word Lines with scissors or switchblade as preferred … The Word Lines keep you in Time … Cut the lines … Make out lines to Space. Take a page of your own writing of you write or a letter or a newspaper article or a page or less or more of any writer living and or dead … Cut into sections. Down the middle. And across the sides … Rearrange the sections … Write the result message …»
«In writing my last two novels, Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded, I have used an extension of the cut-up method I call “the fold-in method”—A page of text—my own or someone else’s—is folded down the middle and placed on another page—The composite text is then read across half one text and half the other—The fold-in method extends to writing the flashback used in films, enabling the writer to move backward and forward on this time track—For example I take page one and fold it into page one hundred—I insert the resulting composite as page ten—When the reader reads page ten he is flashing forward in time to page one hundred and back in time to page one—the déjà vu phenomenon can so be produced to order—This method is of course used in music, where we are continually moved backward and forward on the time track by repetition and rearrangements of musical themes—»
Nothing was easily available about grids, albums, and other montage techniques, at least not for an ordinary teen reader prone to writing experimentation for the sake of it. Though they were all there was, the above quoted scraps were the basics, so the would be writer could set himself to work …
… late october late afternoon dusty light through shutters ajar while she looks down unto the crossway, a long rusty railings on the left, two stray cats over the brick wall around the corner seen through the almost unleafed limbs of a tree, no car noise, dim forgotten music inside—«The Spy» …
… though she did not necessarily come to Mallarmé’s conclusion—«tout, au monde, existe pour aboutir à un livre»—she had often thought that life curdles into things such as stone & stone figures, monuments, books & playing cards, tarot cards …
… walking to and fro on the top of the wall, pricked up tails and lingering rubs of the heads against the bricks, unheard purring sounds, no flash of soft furry claws, deep & drowning feline gazes …
… she turns slowly her back to the window and standing still she stares thoughtfully at the room not seeing it, late afternoon light slanting through the green shutters brushes dusty stacked papers & books, any border faded in melting light and shades …
… feline gloaming whistled & roared in grey wonder & country islands towards island of current explanations … wonder, but not adoration, higher garden of eden … Queen of the Silent crossing trails & crossroads, heavy liminal surf controlling the mysterious sea lit sands / lost / there, everything sees the things unseen, the threshold gates open, astral braves come out,
Note. The above quotations are from William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, The Third Mind, London, John Calder, 1979, pp. 71, 95-96.